others upon a wide range of subjects.

He was indeed the father not alone of a legal system in England, but of
her culture and literature besides. The people of Wantage, his native
town, did well, in 1849, to celebrate the one-thousandth anniversary of
the birth of the great King Alfred.

But a condition of decadence was in progress in England, which Alfred's
wise reign was powerless to arrest, and which his greatness may even
have tended to hasten. The distance between the king and the people had
widened from a mere step to a gulf. When the Saxon kings began to be
clothed with a mysterious dignity as "the Lord's anointed," the people
were correspondingly degraded; and the degradation of this class, in
which the true strength of England consisted, bore unhappy but natural
fruits.

A slave or "unfree" class had come with the Teutons from their native
land. This small element had for centuries now been swelled by captives
taken in war, and by accessions through misery, poverty, and debt,
which drove men to sell themselves and families and wear the collar of
servitude. The slave was not under the lash; but he was a mere chattel,
having no more part than cattle (from whom this title is derived) in
the real life of the state.

In addition to this, political and social changes had been long
modifying the structure of society in a way tending to degrade the
general condition. As the lesser Kingdoms were merged into one large
one, the wider dominion of the king removed him further from the
people; every succeeding reign raising him higher, depressing them
lower, until the old English freedom was lost.